Rossevile's Rat
by Orquideas en la alacena
Summary: Under the dirt and blood, we were still humans. [CREEK]


ROSSEVILLE'S RAT

I have never been able to find the right way to start a story. This will be, perhaps, my worst attempt among them all.

My narration will be simple and I hope it is ok to tell, because many years have passed and it is necessary for me to tell what I witnessed and I thought I could never forget. In fact, I never forgot it, every night I dreamed with the hands and the teeth, and the pain felt so real that I woke up to scratch my skin to try to chase away the sensation that was buried in the aged scars. But, although I have not forgotten it, I am afraid that I will soon have to do it since I can see him even now, at this precise moment, under the door frame. I'm dying, and he does not want to be forgotten.

That's why I'm writing.

I was no more than a spectator in the story I am trying to tell, no more than a friend or a brother to whom this torment really corresponds. His name was Tweek, and he was twelve years old when they killed him.

We were the children of the moldy and putrid streets of Rosseville, raised by the wind that freezes the weakest, and the infected scars that the learnings left behind. We lived in the sewers, and that is why when Tweek's death circulated in the newspapers, the people out there referred to us as Rosseville's rats.

Faith never baptized us, nor did a mother feed us. We were orphaned children whom, for the most part, owed our lives to a couple of thieves. Ma was a woman with rotten teeth and sour breath, Sir was man with wide shoulders and strong fists. Their existence was dedicated to pick up the children that mothers threw into the river, or that they abandoned in the dumps. This was not the case with Tweek, for he was found in the inert arms of a raped mother, with the blood on her neck soaking him completely. I do not think that because he still lived when they found him can be considered good luck.

He grew hungry and aching like all of us, with his feet in raw flesh because of running away from the policemen, like all of us, with his lips broken by the cold wind and the punching, like all of us, and his eyes without shine, like all of us.

At nights we huddled together, but sometimes the cold was so cruel that we woke up hugging bodies without life. At that time, in the good years, we threw the corpses into the river so that the current will take away the stench and, with our children's minds, we hoped that their souls would be able to sleep without cold downstream.

In the bad years, when there was nothing to eat, we sank our fingers into the bruised flesh and took what we could, just as Ma had taught us.

That way we survived, and thus those who succumbed helped us.

But there was a winter in which every night death licked our skin, and each night the corpses were piled on top of each other. I've engrave in my memory the eyes of those children, their dark pupils and their frozen corneas, their lips half open and their bruised tongues. Tweek and I shared a blanket that winter, the only one that still retained a little color between its fibers, and the only one that did not reek of disease. We were children, but the plague does not discriminate.

We survived that winter, but the next one prepared us even more torment.

Of all children, Tweek didn't stand out. His blond hair was not the only one among the many we were, as well as his blue eyes that, once we were dead, we would all have after a few hours. But as I told you at the beginning, this story could have happened to all of us, but it belonged to him.

It was when they arrived that the real pain began. At first we only gave them indecisive, insecure glances, while we watched them sit a few meters away from us, using rotting animal fur to cover their bodies. They spoke very little, and when they did they did it in a low voice, and if you managed to listen, you would know they were not from around here. Ma looked at them cautiously, and she hurried us to give her the stolen coins once we entered the sewers. Sir cleaned a knife in the distance, and looked up very often. They were a silent threat to which we began to get used to little by little.

The first one was Kyle, whom we never saw again and we thought he had been captured by the police.

The second was Butters, whom we found frozen in the river. No one had paid attention to the marks on his bony arms until Tweek pointed them out and then we all assumed they had been made by rats.

The next thing that happened was that Ma and Sir stopped going without warning, and then the men began to look up and not turn their glances away from us.

The third was Stan, but this time we witnessed when he was killed. They were like rats on a piece of meat, tearing his muscles when they pulled him and he tried to escape, and his screams pierced our ears when they broke his ribs trying to subdue him, but his visceral pain soon went silent when he they broke his skull.

What were those beasts? What could the human cruelty would want from a handful of malnourished and terrified children? What could human cruelty want in a land where there is no hope? What else could they take away from us? What could we have that they wanted with so hungry?

The fourth was Clyde, whom the beasts skinned still alive, and whose body they kept for days.

Little by little we discovered their intentions, the reason why they had us immobilized with fear, the reason why they did not allow us to leave the sour world that exists under the streets. The men who had us cornered were the plague, the hunger and the cold.

They were death.

Those beasts so similar to us were a family, and they let us be the ants that bring food to the nest, in exchange for protection. Protection to the horrible things they did to those who didn't fulfill.

Ma and Sir had taught us to steal wallets and expensive handkerchiefs, but the beasts forced us to go further, to crawl under the doors and to pray to a god we did not know so that no one would discover us. Inside the houses we stole coats and leather shoes, glasses with expensive perfumes inside, and pearl necklaces; and when hunger begged us, our dirty hands took grapes and drank them like water.

For some this was what cost them their lives, as many were discovered thanks to having stayed a few more minutes to devour the bread or put apples in their pockets. Those children wouldn't return under the sewers, and would perish up in the world of those who exist.

Down, for those of us who returned, it was much worse. The beasts watched us deposit our robberies in a pile. Bright things were what they valued the most, but some unfortunates had entered houses easier to exceed and had brought things without too much value, like stale wooden toys or mirrors whose frames weren't silver. These children had only a few hours left to live.

But not Tweek, he watched and learned. He knew of the places where he could hide, the time when men are absent and women go shopping in the markets. He knew how to sneak out of people, just covered in his washed-out brown clothes and a beret Tweek preferred never to go alone, he always took me as his partner, and sometimes took Wendy too. He also carried a small dagger in his pocket to force the locks if become necessary.

He was smart, much more than the newspapers gave him credit for. It all started a few weeks after the beasts seized the drain, assaults on houses were only heard in cities, and never before in our hometown. The murders were also scanty, not like in the capital where people whispered about someone eviscerating their victims, but the bodies of our comrades began to appear on the sidewalk, without their eyes and with open throats, a horrid expression imprinted on them. When it was discovered that the found children didn't belong to no family, the citizens lost interest. Nobody cared, we were just animals cuddling in the pipes.

Thanks to Tweek I was never in the beasts' lists, because we always came back with enough things for both of us. Sometimes my own hunger begged me to squeeze my hands in the fruit bowl and bring juicy fruit to my mouth, but he wouldn't let me.

Soon, little by little, the citizens became more and more interested in the robberies. The police became more severe and difficult to evade, even became a much more obvious danger, because if they ever catches you, you would die.

At the beginning of this story we were about forty children, at this point we survived barely a dozen.

It was when they discovered a couple of us inside the house of an old lady, and that they blow our cover, that everything got worse; Now they recognized our existence and we were persecuted, like real rats, to exterminate us.

Under the dirt and blood, we were still humans.

But the beasts kept demanding us things in exchange for our lives, and it was two nights after that that Tweek approached me with shaking hands, like those of an old man, and he drew me a plan. He said between whispers that we should flee from there, that soon winter would come and if it was not by it, the beasts above us or with which we lived would kill us. He planted the idea of freedom in my brain, a word with which I dreamed that night. He told me that the next day we would go out and steal like all the other days, but that we wouldn't return; this time we would take coins and fruit, and fill our pockets with it. We would leave, only him and me, because it would be much harder to achieve if we took more with us. We would have taken Wendy too if she hadn't fallen ill and death hadn't taken her first.

He told me _, "Craig, let yourself feel all the fear you have inside, because there is nothing to feel in death,"_ and so, holding hands, trembling with cold and fear, we left the pipes for the last time.

Outside I thought I felt freedom gently caressing my face. We walk together like the rest of the previous days, with stealth, with fear, with hunger. The house we would enter was in the middle of the street, a two-story building with white walls and a recently watered garden. I trusted Tweek when he told me that there only would be two children inside, and that we could probably persuade them to keep quiet if we ever came across them. We sneaked in through a window that took us to the basement, and the musty smell hurt my lungs.

When we went up the stairs, with the silence that our twelve years of life had taught us to keep, we found ourselves in a wide corridor with enough doors and a sweet smell coming from behind one of them. The kitchen was like many I had been in, but when Tweek handed me an apple and I held it between my fingers, it was as if this was the first time I could have appreciated it in my entire life. He smiled at me, and whispered me to keep going.

He took bread and ham that was on the table, in addition to fresh strawberries of which neither of us had ever tasted before. My lips, so dry from the cold and thirst, were moistened by the juicy flesh of the fruits, and I felt real joy.

I was savoring freedom, and I was hungry, famished, of it.

When our pockets could not contain one more piece, and our bellies hurt with excitement, Tweek and I returned to the hall, to the door that would return us to the streets that for all our lives we called home.

That's when another of the doors opened.

The man shouted furiously and our hearts beat strongly against our chest; we ran and entered one of the rooms, trying to reach the exit, with terror scratching like wild animals at our brains. His hand came out of the air and caught Tweek by the cloth around his neck, and pulled him back with too much force. Once he saw him on the floor, the man ran towards me, and I ran away from him. As expected, he reached me and grabbed me by my arm, pulling my body and throwing me against the nearest wall. My head hurt and my eyes closed for seconds, my legs gave way and when my vision came back I saw them in front of me.

Tweek writhed like one of those animals crawling on the ground, biting and scratching the man on top of him. Tweek was small and fast, and managed to get out of his grip only to be hit to the ground again.

 _"I'm going to kill you, you damn rats, I'm going to kill you and you'll rot in hell!"_

In my life I had felt fear and despair, but nothing could ever make me forget the terror in Tweek's eyes.

Then between his bony fingers he had the dagger, and the tip of it disappeared inside the man's vertebra.

We ran, ran as fast as our legs allowed, as far as our feet took us, as terrified as we had ever been. And without realizing it, we return to the putrid nest of our sorrows.

That's when the disease that is life consumed us.

The beasts waited for us inside, as if they had witnessed everything that had happened and had known about our plan and how it would end all along. They gave us a look and immediately we knew it, and we recoiled with fear, shrinking our bodies to try to disappear. We knew what was coming, and this time we both looked for each other's hands to hold it tightly.

I felt his nails dig into my skin, and the rhythm that flowed from his heartbeat.

The beasts took us and with violence we were separated, our hands trying to reach each other even when we were on the floor, screaming in pain. My paper skin let the scratches tear it to the bone, my vocal cords cracked and my tears burned my eyes. The teeth pierced my flesh, and their bones broke mine.

But behind the sound of my own heart, beating traumatizing my skin, and my own screams, I heard his. I listened to them all time, I listened his pain, and his desperation, and his fear and his sorrow, and those were the ones that in the end broke the rest of the organs inside my chest.

The newspapers that were printed the next day would talk about a body found in some cold and rotten street in Rosseville. A small corpse, with splintered bones and calcined muscles and viscera, blond hair made of coal, white skin blackened by fire. The newspapers talked about the body of a burnt child, but they would not highlight the horrors of his life, let alone his death. It was written about how that creature deformed by the beatings had been punished for his crimes and how it would be the beginning of the extermination of a plague. A plague that they themselves had created.

Nobody ever spoke about a frightened little child, everything was limited to the story of a rat.


End file.
